The Treaty of Buffalo Creek in 1838 had been negotiated in the city, and its provisions had been the central crisis of Parker’s early political education.

The treaty’s contested legitimacy — the allegations of fraud in its negotiation, the signatures of leaders who claimed they had not understood what they were signing or had been coerced into signing — had exposed the Parker family and the broader Tonawanda community to the risk of forced removal from New York to Kansas.

That experience of the treaty process — the gap between the formal language of sovereign-to-sovereign agreement and the practical reality of how such agreements were obtained and enforced — was formative for Parker in ways that went beyond the specific provisions of the 1838 treaty.

It demonstrated, concretely and in the specific context of his own community’s survival, how the legal and political systems of the United States could be used to transfer Native land to non-Native ownership through processes that bore the formal trappings of consent without the substance.